NANCY'S DEAD RELATIVES

User's Guide: What You Should Know About this Site

Viewing:

Nancy's Dead Relatives home page was designed for optimum viewing on a newer, wide screen monitor.  If you're having trouble viewing the page from side to side, you might want to (and can) navigate the entire site from the Table of Contents.    

Content:

This site consists of notes compiled in more than twenty years of sporadic research.  It's not a story, not an interpretive history.  The exception is The Descendants of John Wybert Denty, which has been retained in its original, book form with only minor changes.   In addition to not concerning myself with "narrative flow", I don't provide much historical detail or context, and my own assumptions and  interpretations are identified as such.  Genealogists will be delighted to get to the heart of the matter and non-genealogists may get an idea of the sorts of records used to construct a family history.  Some of the families examined here, those more fascinating than others or simply easier to research, are well documented.  Others not so much!  Some sources are more reliable than others.  Please evaluate the sources cited carefully and judge their reliability accordingly.

        And now the details . . . .

● This genealogy is, for the most part, restricted to those ancestors who came to and lived in North America.  Each "Generation 1" is either that first immigrant to these shores or the earliest ancestor known (at least to me) in North America.

● The internet is easily accessible and therefore exploitable by the unscrupulous.  For that reason no information of a purely personal nature - divorces, social security number, home address - is provided for any person born after 1909.  Easily obtainable public records are included.  Examples would be a census where the parents were born before 1909; a reference to children in the obituary of a parent born before 1909; a birth date already posted on a public site such as Rootsweb or Ancestry, etc.  Therefore, while any individuals born after 1909 have been deleted from the Descendants Charts, they may still appear in the notes, or in the case of the Denty family, within each chapter's narrative.  This is especially true for those known to be deceased.

●  Some families have had entire volumes written about them.  Not wishing to duplicate in great detail information which is already available, those families are examined only briefly here.  The reader is encouraged to examine those previous publications, which are listed in Books & Periodicals.

●  Your dead relative may or may not appear in the notes section, but those known to be in the direct line and their siblings and sibling's children do appear in that family's Descendants Chart.   If your relative doesn't have a hyperlink from the Descendants Chart, but their father does, click on that hyperlink.  Whenever only one or two tidbits were discovered, those bits appears under the child's name in "Children Of _____  _____".

● Notes present the material chronologically.  Notes on married individuals include all known information on any and all spouses.      

● While my notes are mostly abstracts directly from the records, they're occasionally from abstracts compiled by other researchers.  My own asides, comments, speculation, and background information are printed in italics.  Some are in the form of questions.  If you can provide an answer to any question, please contact me.

● Great Britain did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752.  The old Julian calendar was eleven days ahead of the earth's actual position and began the New Year on March 25 rather than Jan 1.  To confuse matters further, the Quakers often referred to their months by their number rather than their name, thus "ye tenth day of ye third month of ye year 1720".  Many genealogists would routinely convert these dates by adding two months, thus "ye third month" might become May; others might take "ye third month" in its modern context, resulting in March; and still others might have used a calculator to arrive at the precise pre-1752 date.  Unless one is looking at the original record, it's impossible to know which method was used.  In this web site, I've used any dates as I found them.  Anyone desiring the precise calendar date should go to the original Quaker records armed with a calendar converter.

● The Descendants of John Wybert Denty was originally printed and sold as a book in 2004.  Because the internet is more accessible and has very different visual requirements and limitations, minor changes have been made.  In addition, material discovered since 2003 has been and will continue to be added.

● In order to make new information easily identifiable to repeat visitors, two methods will be used.  For the most part, updates will be entered into the appropriate section, i.e. chronologically under an individual's notes.  The date the material was added will be entered and highlighted.  for example: NEW 1 Dec 2009.  This should be seen easily when scanning the page.  In The Descendants of John Wybert Denty, the entire entry will be highlighted and added to the relevant note section.  Once again, this should make it very easy for any reader of the original book to quickly discover what may have been added or changed.  Where there are no "relevant" notes,  it will be added to the Addenda.  The words NEW, Edited, Added, or Updated  may appear after that section's title in the Table of Contents.  After two to three months, that designation will be removed in all but the Denty pages.

● Endnotes can greatly complicate the appearance of a page, depending on the browser used.  This site was prepared on Front Page.  It is displayed best using Internet Explorer.  When viewed in other browsers, such as Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera, the lines containing endnote citations appear unevenly spaced because the "baseline" instruction apparently doesn't carry over to other browsers.  

● Also Front Page also doesn't automatically re-number endnotes when new citations are added.   Therefore new citations, entered manually, will usually consist of both a number and a letter.  When an endnote is deleted, the rest can't be renumbered.  That number will simply be missing from the sequence.

● Births and deaths of children and parents that occurred during the life span of a person aren't usually included within that person's chronological notes even though such events, both joyous and tragic, naturally  loomed large in their lives.

● Transcribed wills or letters have been selectively modernized in spelling, punctuation, and capitalization to make reading easier.  All names are spelled as in the original document. 

● I've tried to always give credit to other researchers where appropriate and indicate where sources might disagree.  The exception is often birth, wedding, death dates and places which appear in the Descendants Charts, a format not conducive to endnotes!  My apologies to all those who generously supplied such dates.

● Endnotes consist of the author's name, title, and page number.  For a more complete listing, click on Books & Periodicals.  The first time a source is mentioned in the endnotes, both the author's surname and the title appear.  In subsequent citations of that source, only the author's name appears; and when the same author has written other titles, only the title may appear in subsequent endnotes.

●    I've tried to provide hyperlinks to ease navigation on the site, but occasionally the user must use the "back" on his or her  browser.  This will most often be the case for for photographs, maps, and documents.   

● If you have material about or photographs of any "kinfolk" included in Nancy's Dead Relatives, can add well-documented family lines, or simply have corrections; you're invited to submit that material to me.  I'll then list you, of course, as my source for that information.  However, the decision whether or not to actually include any material is mine alone.

● And perhaps most importantly, the material in this site is for non-profit use only.

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